DISCUSS: How to ease beginners into PA

Do you need one? Other games have done it similarly with goals, for example the rise of nations tutorial had you play a short skirmish match that guided you along without forcing you to do anything.

Tutorials (possibly playermade), AI skirmishes, AI multi-match games (Galactic War, possibly playermade campaigns)...

...For people playing their first game against a human, how about everyone have in their look-up-able stats for "how many games played", because that is a direct representation a new player could use to try and only play against other new players.

It's a little hard to catch, and I can't blame you for not noticing but there are short helpful videos if you click the question mark in the corner.

The problem is, if two new people play, neither of which have learnt anything, they will both have a terrible time and learn little to nothing.
AI matches are fine, but without guidance then players will surely miss out on a lot of little useful things, like build queues, infinite loop, patrols etc.

I liked RoN tutorial immensely.

Win condition - immediate.

The issue was I had no motivation whatsoever to play the tutorial. There were no enemies in the tutorial, there wasn't any reason to play the tutorial, other than just to have a random play around with different war machines that didn't do anything because there weren't any enemies.


While the campaign for whatever reason assumed you knew something about SupCom, I learned more playing the campaign then I would have in the tutorial.

I'm really shocked at the lack of unit-cap information on the UI.


Err... I'm one of those people who don't really like watching videos to learn the game, I'd rather play the game and check the keyboard shortcuts (I spammed delete, hence sadness) then watch a video on how to play. Ideally, I'd read something at my reading pace before I watched a video. (Used to slow internet, so preference for text walkthroughs if I have to)

Aalso Zaphod's 20 minute guide to PA is 20 minutes or so. I could read the same information in about 2 minutes and apply it in game. I could keep it open in another tab and refer back to skimread it if need be.

The best tutorial is usually the single player campaign. A couple rounds of Galactic War against easy AI might be good enough. I personally get really bored with tutorials that consist of text popups, click-here, read this, do this, etc. I almost always just skip it, and for what is fundamentally a sandbox game, people should just have a reason to explore and try things without too much risk. So, easy mode might serve as a kind of tutorial mode.

An interactive tutorial would be the best way to learn but have it broken up in to a series of sections that load different missions. That player can pick.

so some one who played rts before can skip the basic click here to move unit here stage.

Break it down in to navel, ground, air, orbital sections with tactics explained like you could build this to counter this effectively unit appears to die by that unit

They've employed the single best RTS AI designer in the business. I think single-player is very much in mind. In terms of easing the player in, I think polish like that is introduced very late in a game's development.

Tutorial videos/missions are bad because you can't set the pace of the tutorial yourself. Tutorial with pictures/slideshow is a much better idea. Or tooltips that you can toggle with a button press. Something that allows myself to set the pace of the tutorial.

There is no unit cap right now. That is why it is not in the UI.

xD dude you laugh but I know people like that.

It's there to let you experiment with no time pressure. If you already knew how to play why did you bother with any tutorial at all?

lube. lots of lube.
and by lube i mean practice.

seriously, I think a mini-campaign disguised as a tutorial would be a good idea. short goals that pace you through the important stuff like the importance of building lots of units, effectiveness of base defenses, orbital, and planet smashing.

for heaven's sake don't call it a campaign, though, because them ppl will bitch about how short/bad it is and how it took them less than 70 hours to complete, and therefore the whole game is crap.

they never said they would call it "a campaign" they said they would call it "galactic war".

Just a few minutes ago I played on a 6-planet system with a team mate. Once my team mate found me, he tried to attack me. He literally sent all of his units to attack me, thinking I was an opponent, which was kinda funny.

In all seriousness, we do need a more detailed tutorial for beginners.

That is what killed Renegade. Nobody even knew it was a multiplayer game, they judged it on a placeholder singleplayer.

I agree, just play the game. Thats how I learned when I joined at the start of beta. Just play the AI until you can beat him (on normal maybe even hard) then go online. Also watch gameplay videos.

The problem with this, I think, is it scares off a good proportion of the user base, who just feel overwhelmed and don't necessarily want to invest the time to really dig into the game, watch videos etc.

EDIT: and that's the crux of this discussion, how to engage the new players without scaring them off.

We need a community-made tutorial video, methinks. I'll talk to some of our youtubers about it, see what they think.

I was watching a stream of this guy from SC2 who was obviously in his first game - which made me laugh a ton watching him try to figure out how to set a rally point for a factory. Thankfully he didn't get too upset when he figured it out

The best way to learn PA quickly is to watch some of Zaphod's 1v1 POVs and casts. Even the old ones. The concepts of expansion and aggression are sure to help people learn the game quickly.

Besides that, it's all about practice, practice, practice, practice. Cola_Colin doesn't agree with me but.....meh.

I wrote a guide on steam for changing the AI difficulty and also what it does. I suppose that I can see about making a more in depth tutorial later here...